20+ Years In

[pencils]

After 20+ years of collecting and listening to classical music, acquiring thousands of pieces and wading through mounds of Penguin Guides, Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine and reading numerous forum entries here and elsewhere, I have come to one conclusion.

I am still a complete beginner. Just saying.

Bleh 

[North Star]

After 20+ years of collecting and listening to classical music, acquiring thousands of pieces and wading through mounds of Penguin Guides, Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine and reading numerous forum entries here and elsewhere, I have come to one conclusion.

I am still a complete beginner. Just saying.

Bleh 

I would have thought that you would be pleased - I myself prefer the journey to the destination, in musical life or in just plain old life...

[pencils]

I would have thought that you would be pleased - I myself prefer the journey to the destination, in musical life or in just plain old life...

Mixed, really. Don't get me wrong, I am delighted that there is always new material to discover and fresh nuances to explore, but the flipside is that I am constantly wondering why I don't know anything about him/those/her/these. Sat down last night with the Freitas Branco symphonies for the first time, and after all these years, realised again that I have not even begun to scratch the surface.

'Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime...'

[Karl Henning]

I would have thought that you would be pleased [...]

Exactly. The fact that there is such a wealth of great literature out there, is entirely the good sort of problem.

[Szykneij]

After 20+ years of collecting and listening to classical music, acquiring thousands of pieces and wading through mounds of Penguin Guides, Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine and reading numerous forum entries here and elsewhere, I have come to one conclusion.

I am still a complete beginner. Just saying.

Bleh 

And you are probably more of an expert than most who claim to be.

Pack your Blehs away and enjoy!

[Opus106]

The fact that there is such a wealth of great literature out there, is entirely the good sort of problem.

Hear, hear.

[prémont]

After 20+ years of collecting and listening to classical music, acquiring thousands of pieces and wading through mounds of Penguin Guides, Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine and reading numerous forum entries here and elsewhere, I have come to one conclusion.

I am still a complete beginner. Just saying.

Bleh 

After 40 years I feel like you. There are always new informations about and views on things you thought you knew well.

[pencils]

After 40+ years of collecting and listening to classical music, acquiring tens of thousands of pieces, wading through mounds of books on music appreciation and performance, having a PhD on Musicology only for myself, archiving, cataloguing this and that, filling excel sheets over excel sheets and reading numerous forum entries here and elsewhere, I have come to one conclusion.

I still don't know anything...but feel satisfied. Just saying.

This makes me feel better  .

Apart from the fact that your classical exposure is 20 years more than mine. Dagnabbit.

[Karl Henning]

After 40+ years of collecting and listening to classical music, acquiring tens of thousands of pieces, wading through mounds of books on music appreciation and performance, having a PhD on Musicology only for myself, archiving, cataloguing this and that, filling excel sheets over excel sheets and reading numerous forum entries here and elsewhere, I have come to one conclusion.

I still don't know anything...but feel satisfied. Just saying.

Splendid post.

[springrite]

Imagine all those so-called well informed classical music listeners who don't know Karl Henning. We are one up on them! There!




Aside from that, we may "know" little, but we are getting so much out of music. The purpose is NOT to know, but to get what you can out of the music you listen to. I remember when it was just the tunes, themes. Now the same piece is so so much more! That, my friend, is the joy.

Looking at Kimi watch a Mahler symphony DVD, I see myself 35 years ago. Only she's much younger than I was then and so far advanced. Mahler did not come into my life until 10 years later and I did not like it until 20 years later.

[jochanaan]

"...the more you know, the more you find you don't know." -- L. Frank Baum, The Scarecrow of Oz

[mszczuj]

After 35 years of collecting and listening to classical music, acquiring tens of thousands of pieces, wading through mounds of books on music appreciation and performance, I have come to one conclusion.

All that business is still a complete beginner.

[Elgarian]

I take comfort in Socrates - you remember the tale (or one version of it), of how he tried to find the wisest man in Greece and ended up concluding that he himself was the wisest, because he recognised that he knew nothing.

Walter de La Mare wrote a short poem about a similar sort of thing called:

The Old Author

'The End', he scrawled, and blotted it. Then eyed
Through darkened glass night's cryptic runes o'erhead.
'My last and longest book.' He frowned; then sighed:
'And everything left unsaid.'


It's a curious (and endlessly fascinating) paradox, which I find repeats continuously in every aspect of art and life. As time goes on, I find myself forced to shed more and more of my prejudices, preconceptions, and 'firm' beliefs. I don't feel that I'm getting wiser; rather, it's that they let me down and I have to abandon them. It'd be nice to be able to conclude that the less I find I know, the more I see, but often I have to conclude that what I increasingly see is fog!

But then again, if I try to restrict the exercise to something more obviously manageable and focused - like Elgar's violin concerto, I see that over a lifetime I really have made some progress in 'understanding' it. Can I say the same about Der Ring? Probably not; I 'knew' more about it thirty years ago (in the savoir sense) when I was reading lots of books about it, than I do now. These days there's a lot more connaitre in the mix, but I'd feel incapable of writing an essay about it!

[pencils]

I take comfort in Socrates - you remember the tale (or one version of it), of how he tried to find the wisest man in Greece and ended up concluding that he himself was the wisest, because he recognised that he knew nothing.

Walter de La Mare wrote a short poem about a similar sort of thing called:

The Old Author

'The End', he scrawled, and blotted it. Then eyed
Through darkened glass night's cryptic runes o'erhead.
'My last and longest book.' He frowned; then sighed:
'And everything left unsaid.'


It's a curious (and endlessly fascinating) paradox, which I find repeats continuously in every aspect of art and life. As time goes on, I find myself forced to shed more and more of my prejudices, preconceptions, and 'firm' beliefs. I don't feel that I'm getting wiser; rather, it's that they let me down and I have to abandon them. It'd be nice to be able to conclude that the less I find I know, the more I see, but often I have to conclude that what I increasingly see is fog!

But then again, if I try to restrict the exercise to something more obviously manageable and focused - like Elgar's violin concerto, I see that over a lifetime I really have made some progress in 'understanding' it. Can I say the same about Der Ring? Probably not; I 'knew' more about it thirty years ago (in the savoir sense) when I was reading lots of books about it, than I do now. These days there's a lot more connaitre in the mix, but I'd feel incapable of writing an essay about it!

This.

[vandermolen]

After 40 years I feel like you. There are always new informations about and views on things you thought you knew well.

Me too.